When I first saw the new film version of Les Misérables a month ago I was sufficiently awestruck to give it five stars, but was curious this week as to whether I would be quite so bowled over on a second, cooler-headed viewing. Now I am slightly concerned that another month will ever pass in which I will be able to stop myself rewatching it.

Tom Hooper’s thunderclap revamp of the long-running stage show, based in turn on Victor Hugo’s doorstop of a novel, is cinema as battering ram: it slams into your gut 24 times a second until all you can do is roll over and roar along.

A still from Les Miserables

Hooper, hot off The King’s Speech, has made an enormous musical of enormous songs, sung by some of the most enormous-looking faces to have ever appeared on a cinema screen. During a close-up of Hugh Jackman at the prologue’s climax, I could have comfortably curled up inside one of the actor’s nostrils. Then Jackman whinnies his climactic high C and the camera spirals up into the clouds, borne on the wings of Claude-Michel Schönberg’s rollicking score. Well, sorry, but if this stuff doesn’t get you going, your heart must be pumping cold porridge.

France, 1815: Louis XVIII is restored to power and the Revolution is a distant memory. Jackman is Jean Valjean, a chain gang slave who skips parole to reinvent himself as mayor of Montreuil. He is thereby caught up in the tragic story of Fantine (Anne Hathaway), a seamstress who falls on hard times, and her angelic daughter Cosette (Isabelle Allen). Meanwhile, the iron-willed lawman Javert (Russell Crowe) vows to bring Valjean to justice. History surges towards the Paris Uprising of 1832, and the ever-swelling cast of characters – Amanda Seyfried as the adult Cosette, Eddie Redmayne as Marius, her sweetheart on the barricades, Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as a pair of villainous publicans – hang on, and sing on, for dear life.

Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean

Hooper’s masterstroke was to make his cast sing live on set, rather than lip-sync to prerecorded studio tracks. This is not quite the innovation it has been sold as (live singing in musicals was standard practice in Hollywood until the mid-1930s), but in a film where almost all of the dialogue is set to music, it gives those words a raw, dramatic vitality, and the odd bum note is a price worth paying.

The payoff is never greater than in Hathaway’s half-sung, half-sobbed performance of I Dreamed A Dream, which Hooper captures in a single, mesmeric four and a half-minute take. The nod to Maria Falconetti’s brimming eyes and bottomless pathos in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is howlingly immodest, and yet Hathaway lives up to it. I’ll say it again: this will be the clip they show before she wins her Oscar.

Anne Hathaway as Fantine

While Hathaway has been rightly singled out, the entire cast is a joy: even Crowe, who generally lands within spitting distance of the note he is aiming at. Samantha Barks as Éponine and young Daniel Huttlestone as Gavroche are two welcome imports from the West End production, and Bertie Carvel is a hoot as a seamy boulevardier. And then there is Redmayne, who swoops on screen in a flash of lips and cheekbones and breaks every heart in the cinema. During One Day More, when he sings “My place is here, I fight with you,” the line runs you through like a Rada-polished bayonet.

Eddie Redmayne and Amanda Seyfried

Why does this work? Modern cinemagoers have no more common ground with Marius’s rather glamorised plight than they do with, say, Iron Man or the Incredible Hulk, and yet I found myself sobbing along with the rest of the auditorium.

This reaction has been pooh-poohed by some American critics, who made the mistake of trying to engage with the film as drama. Les Misérables is a blockbuster, and the special effects are emotional: explosions of grief; fireballs of romance; million-buck conflagrations of heartbreak. Accordingly, you should see it in its opening week, on a gigantic screen, with a fanatical crowd. There is a strong possibility I may be among them. Crying, probably.